I’ve spent the entire day converting log files. To be more truthful, I spent an hour or so crafting a Perl program to do the actual conversion, but I’ve spent the rest of the day watching my machine crunch away at the log files.

We had an ‘incident’ on our Packeteer AppCelera box. We are running beta software (we’re in the same building as their Canadian office), and there was an issue with a recent beta that caused the log files to be exported in some wierd internal format instead of W3C format. I had to convert two and a half months of mangled log files. At 4pm on a Friday, it’s finally done.

Once we discovered the problem (why did it take me two and a half months to notice the problem?), Packeteer immediately got the programmers involved, found the bug, corrected it, and immediately compiled a new build for us. Now that’s service!

Programming. That’s what I do for a living. Well, that’s what I try to do for a living. Most of the time I’m just managing people. But at least my job description says I’m a programmer. It’s funny that programming is what I want to do when I’m trying to escape.

Several years ago, I put together a 6502 8-bit CPU emulator core. I used this core inside my Compukit emulator.

That was a few years ago. I’ve barely touched it since. But recently, I’ve had thoughts of putting together an Atari emulator. I know there’s plenty of Atari emulators out there, so this isn’t new ground I’m covering. This time, it’s not going to be on a Windows platform. I’m using this as an opportunity to get my feet wet in X programming under Linux. I’m playing with Gladeas a UI builder. I’ll let you know how I get on.